Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians

27.5.09

In the summer of 2002, as Jane Mayer described it in her book The Dark Side, “The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating from [Guantánamo], dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was.” After interviewing a random sample of two dozen or so Arabic-speaking prisoners, the analyst “concluded that an estimated one-third of the prison camp’s population of more than 600 captives at the time, meaning more than 200 individuals, had no connection to terrorism whatsoever.”

The analyst expressed his concerns to Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, Guantánamo’s senior military commander, and “was further disconcerted to learn that the general agreed with him that easily a third of the Guantánamo detainees were mistakes.” “Later,” Mayer added, “Dunlavey raised his estimate to fully half the population.”

Dunlavey didn’t explain what he believed about the other half of the prison’s population, but in 2006 a team at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey analyzed the publicly available information about 517 prisoners, which had been released by the Pentagon, and discovered that, according to their own records, which explained the circumstances of the prisoners’ capture and described their purported connections to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and the rest, as Mayer put it, “were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee US bombs.” She added, “The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-US players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”

Analyzing this information, and bearing in mind that, at the time the Seton Hall team compiled its report, records did not exist for 200 other prisoners because they had already been released, the stark conclusion is that, according to the Pentagon’s own findings, only around 40 of the prisoners were alleged to have had any connection with al-Qaeda, and the rest were either innocent men, Afghan Taliban recruits, or foreigners recruited to help the Taliban fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism.

In 2002, after the CIA analyst completed his survey of the Guantánamo prisoners, he wrote a report about what he had discovered. As Mayer described it, “He mentioned specific detainees by name, so there was no confusion about whom the United States was wrongly holding. He made clear that he believed that the United States was committing war crimes by holding and questioning innocent people in such inhumane ways.”

His report soon reached John Bellinger, legal counsel to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. “Immediately distressed,” as Mayer put it, Bellinger convened a meeting with the analyst, attended by Gen. John Gordon, the National Security Council’s senior terrorism expert (and a former Deputy Director of the CIA), and the two men then approached White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to discuss the report’s significance.

When they went to meet Gonzales, however, they found him flanked by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Legal Counsel, and Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office. “Neither had any official national security role,” Mayer wrote, “and no one had warned Bellinger that they would be there. But they did all the talking.”

According to two sources who told Mayer about the meeting, Addington dismissed Bellinger’s concerns by declaring, imperiously, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!” After Bellinger fired back, pointing out that this was “a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Addington replied, “We are not second-guessing the President’s decision. These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please us that phrase. They’ve all been through a screening process. There’s nothing to talk about.” Mayer added, “The President had made a group-status identification, as far as he was concerned. To Addington, it was a matter of presidential power, not a question of individual guilt or innocence.”

How Cheney and Addington destroyed all notions of justice

I hope Jane Mayer — and her publishers — will forgive me for quoting at length from her book, but these passages — plus the research undertaken by the Seton Hall Law School, and, I believe, my own research for my book The Guantánamo Files, and the many hundreds of articles I have written in the last two years — should demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the administration’s claim that its “War on Terror” prisoners were so exceptionally dangerous that they should be treated neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, entitled to the protections of the US legal system, was hyperbole of the most reckless and damaging kind.

Far from being a prison for “the worst of the worst,” Guantánamo was, in fact, nothing more than a chaotic assemblage of largely random prisoners, mostly bought from the US military’s opportunistic allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or from villagers and townspeople desperate for the bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” averaging $5,000 a head, which were advertised on leaflets dropped from planes. These stated, “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.”

In addition, and contrary to Addington’s claims, none of the prisoners had been through a screening process at all. In all previous wars since Vietnam, the US military had held “competent tribunals” under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions. These involved screening prisoners close to the time and place of capture, to ascertain whether they were combatants or civilians caught up in the fog of war, and during the first Gulf War, for example, the military held around 1,200 of these tribunals, and in three-quarters of the cases the prisoners were sent home. In the “War on Terror,” however, the competent tribunals were ruled out, and, in fact, the orders that came down from on high stipulated that every single Arab who came into US custody was to be transferred to Guantánamo.

Once in Guantánamo, there was no improvement. It was not until June 2004 that the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights, and even when this happened the government responded not by allowing the prisoners to challenge the basis of their unexplained detention in a US court, as the Supreme Court intended, but by introducing the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. A mockery of the Article 5 competent tribunals — given that the military knew almost nothing about the majority of the men in its custody — the tribunals drew largely on confessions made through the use of torture, coercion or bribery, or “generic” information that had nothing to do with the prisoners. In addition, as was explained by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the tribunals, they were, essentially, designed not to ascertain whether the prisoners had been seized by mistake, but to rubberstamp their designation, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held without charge or trial.

As a result, Mayer’s description of David Addington’s response to the complaints aired by John Bellinger should also confirm that this sinister experiment in arbitrary detention and interrogation — which involved the US not only tearing up the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual, but also attempting to circumvent the anti-torture statute — was based on an arrogant presumption that the President was above the law, that “innocence” and “guilt” were irrelevant constructs, and that it was justifiable to hold any number of prisoners forever, and to interrogate them as often and as coercively as the government wished.

This was done in order to build up a “mosaic” of intelligence not just about the small group of men responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (and the previous attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000), but also about Afghan resistance to the US presence in Afghanistan, about every single Muslim resistance group around the world (whether “terrorists” or not), and — from exotic captives like the handful of Russians who were seized, or the 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban) — about the activities of their own governments.

Fearmongering, cowardice and terrible policy decisions

I mention all these facts at this particular time because the last few weeks have seen a torrent of scaremongering, misinformation and woefully misguided policy proposals pour forth from the nation’s politicians — and the President — with regard to Guantánamo, and I believe it is important to set the record straight.

First, up were Republicans, inspired, no doubt, by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who appears to be on an endless “Torture Tour,” touting lies about the efficacy of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in keeping the nation safe, and failing to mention how he used torture to produce lies to justify the invasion of Iraq. In a movement that rapidly snowballed, Senators and Representatives from across the country repeated unsubstantiated lies about the dangers posed by the prisoners in Guantánamo, and sounded fearful warnings about the implications of moving any of them to prisons on the US mainland.

On Thursday, Obama regained some of this lost ground. In a speech in which he made it clear that he was doing his best to clear up the “mess” left by his predecessors, he chastised the fearmongers for muddying a genuine debate about how to proceed. However, Obama too demonstrated that he has been infected by what he described as the Bush administration’s “season of fear,” by proposing that the prisoners at Guantánamo who will not be freed will either be tried in federal courts, put forward for trial in an amended version of the failed Military Commissions introduced by Dick Cheney and David Addington, or subjected to “preventive detention.”

I have no problem with the first of these proposals, and was encouraged that, on the same day, the Justice Department announced that a former “high-value detainee” at Guantánamo, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, would be tried in a New York court for his alleged participation in the 1998 African embassy bombings. However, I was disturbed that the President thought it worth proposing Military Commissions as a possible parallel path (given that no sticking plaster can disguise how corrupt the whole process was under the Bush administration), and completely dismayed that he could contemplate introducing a form of “preventive detention,” and was advocating legitimizing the Guantánamo regime (which is, of course, a form of “preventive detention”) for use on prisoners against whom no case can be brought because the supposed evidence will not stand up to independent scrutiny — meaning, of course, that it is tainted by torture or other forms of coercion, and is therefore not evidence at all.

A global witch hunt

At the start of this article, I presented some dark truths about Guantánamo in the hope that the account would demonstrate why the prison must be closed, and why few of the 240 men still held — perhaps 10 percent, perhaps a little more — represent a threat to the United States. In conclusion, if you’d like a few final, shocking facts about the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” consider what David Addington, acting as the mouthpiece of the de facto President, Dick Cheney, was really doing when he dismissed John Bellinger’s complaints in the fall of 2002.

Far from just defending a detention policy that, with the blessing of Congress, had filled the cell blocks at Guantánamo (on the basis that the Authorization For Use Of Military Force, passed in the first week after the 9/11 attacks, authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001”), Addington was also defending the expansion and extension of this policy around the world. Taking into account the prisoners held in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo actually makes up less than 1 percent of the total number of prisoners (at least 80,000 between 2001 and 2005, according to figures released by the Pentagon), who have been held at some point in the “War on Terror,” without either the effective protection of the Geneva Conventions or the protections of the US criminal justice system.

This was, if I may be blunt, a witch hunt on the most colossal scale, but I hope these statistics also help to explain why every facet of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” needs dismantling, so that only two categories of prisoner are allowed in future: prisoners of war, seized in wartime and protected by the Geneva Conventions, and terrorists, to be treated as criminal suspects and put forward for trial in federal courts.

John Bellinger and others in the Bush Administration, while they can take solace, perhaps, in being “less evil than Cheney and Addington”… bear their own culpability.

More to the point, Cheney and Addington, despite their “summa cum evil,” did not operate in a vacuum. They stepped into a government with a key leadership vacuum at the top (ostensibly empty suit where the President should be), and similar vacancies existed where Congress, the courts, the press, and a huge portion of the public should have been.

It wasn’t just that we had a government where George W. Bush’s concern was starting and ending his meetings on time and that everyone had their nice white shirts, ties and jackets on… and substance was secondary (if that high)… in short,a government of apple polishers and brown nosers, where “personal loyalty” was the currency. Under such rules, if one wanted to keep their cushy job, one went with the program. It was more than that. Why stop with the higher rungs of the executive branch ladder? Congressional leadership thought the best use of its time was to organize singings of the national anthem outside the Capitol while it passed thousand page “national security bills” that no one even read! Anything of real substance… the enemy!

And the courts were usually just willing to “defer” to the other two feckless branches of government.

And as to the press, other than readers of this blog, I have no doubt that millions more people can identify the final five contestants on American Idol than could name a single member of “the war council”… the little working group with a fantasy of toughness that gave us so much of what we have today…

And let’s not forget a citizenry that, despite to its credit a huge swathe that was not jiggy with the program, still reelected Republicans in 2002 and 2004 solely on the basis of being scared out of their pants by the notion of dark-skinned people being terrrrrrrrorists (as if the Democrats were much better anyway!).

And thus was the whole problem: a toxic brew whose base stock was a society primed to be dummed down after decades of being told that everything is fine, everyone is wonderful and everything we do is perfect, once reality in the form of 11 September intervened, Americans failed to question any of those (patently absurd) suggestions, and only now, with the economy collapsing under us, are we even starting to.

Let’s give Cheney and Addington their due: they saw this big picture, and pushed it for all it was worth. But a healthier society could have resisted their particular virulent strain.

Ow!
Thanks, TD, for setting this week’s honesty test, asking Americans to look in the mirror and answer the question, “When Dick Cheney and David Addington were eviscerating the rule of law, establishing a global gulag to interrogate randomly-seized prisoners for the rest of their natural lives, and extracting lies through torture to justify an illegal war that they had desired since long before coming to power, did you oppose it, or were you complicit, either by turning away, or — in all manner of ways — by helping facilitate it?”

Thanks to the publication of Cooperative Village, I like what I see in my mirror, Andy. I tried with all my heart, mind and resources available in the place and moment when it counted most, not from the safety of distance and time, to affect consciousness, to stir the air currents, to enliven the atmosphere around these issues for ordinary Americans. I was helped a little and stymied a lot. Whatever the ultimate outcome of my efforts I know in my heart I leave behind a legacy of light. Even rainbows.

I know you did, Frances. And so did many, many others. I was quite happy to direct my ire at Cheney and Addington and their monstrous little circle of enthusiasts for dictatorship and torture, but I felt that TD raised a valid point about complicity and complacency.

I think the struggle is always — in every walk of life — between those who seek power over others, and those who don’t, and that the latter, through tolerance and their desire NOT to control, rarely appear to have the upper hand — although life as it is lived at its best involves cooperation rather than competition, so we are constantly victorious on a daily, everyday basis.

The problem, as I think TD has highlighted, is when those in control reach beyond the kind of everyday abuse of power that we might expect, concoct grandiose schemes that affect the entire world, and manage to persuade others that they are showing strength and leadership rather than psychopathic tendencies.

Not for the first time in the past several years, I am reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis famously said:

“Men feared witches and burnt women.”

While I find this quote otherwise apropos, I am loathe to ever use the word “fear” in the context of this ill-begotten “war” on “terror”. I firmly believe that fear has played an exceedingly small role in motivating those who have effected and conducted this “war” (although fear has obviously played a key role in terms of how the U.S. population has been conditioned to accept what is being done in their name).

As time goes by and our knowledge of the true facts of Guantanamo slowly surface (driven by people such as Mr. Worthington), it becomes increasingly clear this is as much an old-fashioned cover-up of government incompetence as it is anything else.

Boiling Frog,
Good to hear from you and thanks for the insight. It hardly seems credible that covering up incompetence could be a major factor in determining government policy, but I think it’s certainly a major factor in the reluctance to close Guantanamo sooner rather than later, with other, “cautious” voices also playing the fear card, and warning of the dangers posed by the prisoners.

However, at the heart of it all (which was why I drew on Jane Mayer’s work), I think there must be an extreme reluctance to really take on board the fact that, in the demonstration of unfettered executive power that was sought and realized by Cheney and Addington, guilt and innocence were irrelevant, and what was of particular importance was simply the President’s “right” to break the law however he saw fit.

That — like the steady flow of revelations that prisoners were tortured to provide information that could be used to justify the invasion of Iraq — seems to me to be forbidden territory for most of the media, presumably because it paints such an unflinchingly grim demonstration of the crimes of the Bush administration, but, like the embarrassment and the mistaken fearmongering, it’s all going to have to come out eventually.

After I wrote back to the Talking Dog suggesting that he was “on fire,” I received the following reply:

Thanks much; the only solace we can take is that no one seems to want to hire Mr. Addington; you’d think the Cheney household would need a butler if nothing else…

It seems, as btw we all knew was inevitable, that when Obama proposes dictatorial measures (and note that he is a good “process liberal” and suggests doing them with Congressional and court imprimatur)… then his dictatorial measures are good and glorious (unlike Bush’s which were dark and nefarious), because, of course, they emerged from the kewl kid Democrat, and not from the nasty Republican.

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Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo, co-director, We Stand With Shaker. Also, singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers) and photographer. Email Andy Worthington